If the program you’re using has the tagging capability you want that’s great. Apple has been introducing changes to iTunes that make it more classical music-friendly, adding the ability to identify the composer, movement name and movement number. Music management programs differ in the number and variety of tags they can accommodate. Identifiers such as band, album, or conductor are known as tags, and they’re the key to being able to find the music you want in your collection. But if that information isn’t in the database, the program can’t find those tracks for you. You might want to make a playlist of works conducted by Carlos Kleiber, or compare the second movement of a symphony as conducted by various conductors (or the same symphony at various points in a conductor’s career, or with different orchestras). For classical music, one might want to know the composer, soloist(s), orchestra, conductor, work/movement, catalog number…you get the idea. The market bends toward popular music, for which knowing the band or performer, album, and song is mostly sufficient classification. To be fair, many other music management programs aren’t either. It’s fairly easy to use, it works efficiently, mostly seamlessly. It can be used on Apple and Windows computers. One of the most commonly used programs for this purpose is iTunes. But you need a program to build playlists to get the perfect music mix and to be able to search your music library for an item you want. It’s easy to buy music in digital form (see, for example, my 99 cent wonders list), or you can convert the physical media you already have (called ripping more on that another day).
I’ve still got shelves of CDs (and LPs), but to play music on a portable device or computer, you have to have it in digital form. If you’re like me, you’ve acquired a substantial digital library of classical music.